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The Hardware Guide for Mobile GamersThu, 22 Jan 2015 01:39:04 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Nvidia GeForce 965M Introduced in New MSI Laptopshttp://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/nvidia-geforce-965m-introduced-in-new-msi-laptops/
http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/nvidia-geforce-965m-introduced-in-new-msi-laptops/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 01:39:04 +0000http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/?p=4216At CES 2015, MSI updated their range of gaming laptops in the GE series, but the most interesting part of the launch was the use of Nvidia’s new upper-midrange GeForce GTX 965M, which is based on the energy-efficient Maxwell architecture and has a lot in common with the desktop GTX 960.

The Taiwanese manufacturer MSI launched two newcomers with Nvidia’s brand new graphics chip GeForce GTX 965M, which by all accounts is a mobile equivalent of the upcoming GeForce GTX 960. The laptops in question are the 17-inch MSI GE72 and the 15-inch MSI GE62.

MSI’s GE62 Apache measures 15.6 inches and comes with a 1920 x 1080 panel. It replaces both predecessors GE60 and the more expensive GT60 in the same size category. Inside you’ll find an Intel Core i7-4720HQ (2.6GHz, 3.2GHz Turbo), up to 12 GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The larger GE72 Apache with a 17.3-inch screen comes with more or less identical specifications.

The main attraction, however, is the new graphics card GeForce GTX 965M with 1024 CUDA cores running at 944 MHz plus Boost, 2 GB of memory at an effective 5 GHz clock speed (GDDR5) and a 128-bit memory bus. This closely matches the specs of the brand new GTX 960 for desktops, which is rather unusual. Normally, laptop chips are considerably down-scaled compared to their desktop counterparts.

The transition to theMaxwell architecture helps keep the power consumption and heat generation to a minimum, which should extend the battery life up to 6 hours under lighter loads – an excellent figure for a gaming laptop. MSI has also trimmed the profiles of the new models.

Other gaming features include a keyboard from SteelSeries with multi-colored backlighting, a revised cooling solution with two fans, a network card from Killer NIC and sound via the Sound Blaster Cinema 2. MSI has not seen fit to drop the optical drive however, but the wireless network modules are now 802.11ac using an Intel chip, Bluetooth 4.0, two USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, HDMI 1.4 ports and an SD card reader.

The new models should hit store shelves in January and sell for roughly the same prices as their predecessors.

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http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/nvidia-geforce-965m-introduced-in-new-msi-laptops/feed/0Acer to Launch Updated Aspire V17 Nitro at CES 2015http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/acer-to-launch-updated-aspire-v17-nitro-at-ces-2015/
http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/acer-to-launch-updated-aspire-v17-nitro-at-ces-2015/#commentsMon, 05 Jan 2015 13:36:33 +0000http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/?p=4212Acer arrives at CES 2015 with the 17-inch Aspire V17 Nitro in tow. Like its 15-inch sibling, it’s a low-key, elegant device with a Haswell processor and the Maxwell-based Nvidia GTX 860M. It also comes with the Kinect-inspired feature RealSense.

The V17 Nitro has a built-in stereo (3D) camera and technology from Intel that brings (hopefully) intuitive and useful gesture controls to your laptop. Previous attempts to integrate such technologies directly into laptops, such as Leap Motion, have been mildly successful, but with Intel behind it the technology might just take off.

Intel’s RealSense concept consists of a regular camera, an infrared camera and an infrared laser. It not only detects the users’ movements, but can also scan 3D objects, among other things. The gesture control technology recognizes hand movements, but also head movements and even facial expressions.

Needless to say, this also enables in-game gesture interactions. In its press release Acer introduces the “Warrior Wave”, which lets you manipulate in-game characters and objects. Additionally, the feature “3DMe” will 3D-scan your face for use in supported games, or to order 3D-printed action figures of yourself.

Of course, the Aspire V17 Nitro is also equipped with an array of powerful hardware that should handle all current titles in Full HD resolution. Other than th 17.3-inch display, there’s an Intel Core i7-4710HQ and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M with 4GB of VRAM under the hood. The laptop can hold up to 16 GB of RAM and a 128/256 GB SSD combined with a regular hard drive of up to 1TB (2.5”) for additional storage space.

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http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/acer-to-launch-updated-aspire-v17-nitro-at-ces-2015/feed/0Alienware 13 Launched with External GPU Cabinethttp://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/alienware-13-launched-with-external-gpu-cabinet/
http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/alienware-13-launched-with-external-gpu-cabinet/#commentsFri, 07 Nov 2014 14:40:11 +0000http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/?p=4203The Alienware M11x was Dell’s first attempt at an ultraportable (sort of) gaming laptop, which was rather successful. Earlier this year, Dell announced a modern follow-up in the form of a new 13-inch Alienware 13, which positions itself between the manufacturer’s now-defunct 11,6-inch and 14-inch models.

Portable gaming is more popular than ever and many of the world’s largest notebook manufacturers are launching slimmer and more portable gaming machines in addition to their ordinary workhorses in the 15-17-inch interval. Dell’s latest attempt to meet this demand is the Alienware 13, which was announced last quarter and has now been officially launched.

What makes this one different is that it’s been rolled out along with an Alienware Graphics Amplifier, a cabinet to dock the laptop with an external (desktop) graphics card.

The computer itself weighs about 4 pounds and can be purchased with three different screen resolutions, including a rather mediocre 1366 x 768, Full HD 1920 x 1080 up to QHD: 2560 x 1440 pixels. The Alienware 13 can be configured with a low-voltage Intel Core i5-4210U processor (2.7 GHz) and an Nvidia Geforce GTX 860M, with 640 Maxwell-based CUDA cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory, as well as 8 or 16 GB of internal RAM.

The interesting Alienware Graphics Amplifier is an external cabinet where you can plug in any PCIe graphics card with a TDP of up to 375 watts, as well as four USB devices such as mouse and keyboard. The cabinet is connected across a proprietary PCIe and USB-based connection to the Alienware 13 to easily hook it up when you’re at home and want some extra graphics muscle. 375 W of juice allows you to install just about any single-GPU desktop graphics card at the moment, including the – also Maxwell-based – GTX 980, which has a mere 165 W TDP.

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http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/alienware-13-launched-with-external-gpu-cabinet/feed/0Will Nvidia’s GRID Replace Your Gaming PC?http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/will-nvidias-grid-replace-your-gaming-pc/
http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/will-nvidias-grid-replace-your-gaming-pc/#commentsFri, 11 Jan 2013 11:16:10 +0000http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/?p=3206Nvidia’s press conference at CES wasn’t just about the company’s upcoming (and very cool) portable gaming console Project Shield. The company also talked about GRID, which is a new streaming service that lets you play PC games just about everywhere, including on a tablet, Smart TV, or even smartphone. Project Shield is one of the most talked-about new contraptions coming out of CES this year – a portable Android device based on Tegra 4 that lets you play both Android games and stream full-scale PC games to a handheld controller and display. However, Nvidia is also gearing up to compete with OnLive, the service for gaming “over the cloud”.

The new competitor’s name is Nvidia GRID and seems to be working in roughly the same way, by rendering the game’s graphics remotely and streaming it to your device. According to Nvidia, this service allows you to play a PC game on your tablet, pause the game and continue playing right where you were on your PC. All of this is of course accomplished using a host of GeForce graphics card that power the games inside a remote data center. Games are streamed to your device in the form of H.264 video.

You do not need to purchase any additional hardware when the service is released in the U.S. likely sometime in 2013. Considering that this is Nvidia running the service, it’s possible that the graphics are better than OnLive, but it is unlikely that this solution is sufficient for gamers looking to play games like Battlefield 3 and CoD:MW3 online with minimum lag. Although Nvidia promises that the response times will be minimal, this physically requires close proximity to the data center.

Besides, Nvidia will want to continue selling hardware to regular gaming PCs and laptops, so it seems probable that GRID will target casual gamers rather than enthusiasts.

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http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/will-nvidias-grid-replace-your-gaming-pc/feed/19MSI GT70 Dragon Edition Available Nowhttp://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/msi-gt70-dragon-edition-available-now/
http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/msi-gt70-dragon-edition-available-now/#commentsSun, 30 Dec 2012 13:02:03 +0000http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/?p=3132MSI released the latest incarnations of its 15.6″ and 17″ gaming laptops – also known as the GT60 and GT70 – in conjunction with Intel’s Ivy Bridge launch earlier this year. Now the manufacturer has updated the GT70 with an interesting dragon pattern, but also and more importantly with a brand new graphics card.

The standard version of the GT70 is MSI’s flagship and a high-end laptop in its own right, but the so-called Dragon Edition is even more impressive. Underneath the dark red accents and stylized dragon you will find one of the fastest mobile Ivy Bridge (quad-core) processors as well as Nvidia’s fastest mobile graphics card, the Kepler-based GeForce GTX 680M (technically, the fastest mobile GPU right now is the GTX 680MX, but this card is likely too hot for laptops).

The GTX 680M graphics card comes with 1344 CUDA cores running at 720 MHz and a 256-bit memory bus with 2 gigabytes of GDDR5 memory at 1800 MHz, the effective bandwidth being 115.2 Gigabytes per second. This graphics card is significantly faster than the Fermi-based GTX 675M (without the ‘X’) and is therefore more than sufficient to run all current games at high settings on the 17.3-inch display’s native resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels.

In terms of storage, there are several options, but the ‘entry-level’ Dragon Edition is equipped with two 128 GB SSDs in RAID 0 – also known as “Super Raid” – plus a 750 GB mechanical hard drive. Furthermore, the computer is equipped with up to 32 gigabytes of RAM, a Blu-ray burner, Dynaudio 2.1-channel audio, and a backlit keyboard from SteelSeries. It also uses Qualcomm’s Killer Wireless-N module that supports 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi in dual-band mode (2.4 and 5.0 gigahertz).

The GT70 Dragon Edition is available now with prices starting at just below $3,000 for the GT70 with a Corei7-3740QM processor (2.7-3.7 GHz). At the other end of the spectrum is the GT70 with Intel’s ‘Extreme Edition’ Core i7-3940XM (3.0-3.9 GHz unlocked) for about $1,000 more. All of the models are equipped with the GTX 680M, so it should be noted that at this level, a much more expensive CPU will only affect the gaming frame rates by an unnoticeable amount.

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http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/msi-gt70-dragon-edition-available-now/feed/0‘Solar System’ Radeon HD 8000M Due Early Next Yearhttp://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/solar-system-radeon-hd-8000m-due-early-next-year/
http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/solar-system-radeon-hd-8000m-due-early-next-year/#commentsMon, 17 Dec 2012 16:36:55 +0000http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/?p=3107According to Chinese website EXPreview, AMD is planning to launch a new batch of graphics cards for laptops and other compact systems under the none-too surprising Radeon HD 8000M brand name.

There’s not that many news other than the fact that the new series is (allegedly) to be released during CES 2013. One of the details that we couldn’t have guessed is that AMD is apparently using the solar system for codenames, as opposed to the current Northern/Southern Islands designations.

AMD is skipping Mercury and moves straight to Venus and Mars, initially, but whether these are based on the current Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture or an updated GCN2 is not known. Both Nvidia and AMD have been mixing architectures no matter what model series they belong to in the past, so the solar system gimmick really says nothing of the manufacturer’s intentions.

Other specifications include support for DX 11.1, OpenGL 4.3 and OpenCL 1.2. Regardless of the architecture being used, the HD 8000M will still be based on the 28nm manufacturing process, so any dramatic improvement in power efficiency is unlikely.

Interestingly, Asus recently unveiled a VivoBook U38DT laptop – a 13.3-inch machine equipped with a HD 8550M, which some speculated might be a rebadged GPU from the HD 7000M series, but now it looks like it might be the real deal, an entirely new graphics card.

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http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/solar-system-radeon-hd-8000m-due-early-next-year/feed/0Intel Moving Towards 14nmhttp://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/intel-moving-towards-14nm/
http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/intel-moving-towards-14nm/#commentsThu, 06 Dec 2012 10:37:09 +0000http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/?p=3082Moore’s Law is apparently still valid as far as Intel is concerned. The chip giant is already well ahead of the competition and intends to trample it yet again by moving to a 14nm production process while competitors like AMD remain at 28nm or higher.

A smaller production process leads to more energy-efficient chips that use less energy and produce less heat to provide the same level of performance (more transistors in the same physical space). By and large it’s a major improvement in most types of circuitry (excluding, perhaps, SSDs).

Intel is already in the lead with a 22nm process in the latest Ivy Bridge processors, but according to Digitimes, the company is on schedule to move to a 14nm process, with 10nm on the horizon.

Intel’s CTO Justin Rattner says that Moore’s Law will be valid for at least another 10 years, not least because Intel is aggressively pursuing said law.

The plan is to produce 14nm CPUs and SoCs (System-on-a-Chip) at the end of 2013. Starting 2015, Intel will gradually move to 10nm and eventually 7nm and 5nm.

Intel seems intent on leaving its competitors in the dust. There is currently very little chance of AMD catching up within a reasonable time frame, which really is unfortunate since some competition is clearly needed in the CPU industry.

According to the same article on Digitimes, Samsung enters 20nm in 2013 and is on track for moving to 14nm, while TSMC enters small-volume production of 20nm chips in the second half of 2013. None of these companies produce x86 processor, although TSMC produces GPU chips for Nvidia and AMD–currently at 28nm.

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http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/intel-moving-towards-14nm/feed/0Going Pro: MSI Launches GT60 Workstationhttp://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/going-pro-msi-launches-gt60-workstation/
http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/going-pro-msi-launches-gt60-workstation/#commentsMon, 03 Dec 2012 13:37:22 +0000http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/?p=3072MSI is now launching a laptop with a professional-grade Nvidia Quadro K2000M graphics card. The model in question is the GT60 and other than the GPU it appears to have the same feature set as the GT60 gaming laptop.

Gaming laptops are usually high-end machines, so using them as professional workstations is never a bad idea. However, for professional 3D rendering, CAD, DCC and so on you probably want a GPU with certified drivers.

MSI is meeting that demand by using an Nvidia Quadro card in the pro version of the GT60. More specifically it’s a Quadro K2000M, which is equipped with the Kepler GK107 core with 384 CUDA cores and a 128-bit memory bus. These specs make it comparable to the GT 650M or GTX 660M on the consumer side, so it wouldn’t make the best gaming laptop list.

Unlike the consumer GeForce series, this GPU is not optimized for gaming but for professional applications, so it probably performs a bit worse in games compared to those cards. On the other hand this shouldn’t matter much if you’ll mostly be using it professionally. Besides, it is optimized for professional uses and should perform a lot better in these situations.

According to MSI, the K2000M is orders of magnitude faster than the GTX 675M in certain OpenGL benchmarks, including 10x better than the 675M in ProE -05 and 4x faster in SolidWorks -02. It’s also 6x faster in Catia -03, whatever that is.

The rest of the hardware is largely the same as the GT60 for gamers. That includes quad-core Core i7 processors, up to 32 GB of RAM, up to dual SSDs in RAID-0 (including an mSATA SSD), Killer Wi-Fi and a keyboard by SteelSeries (which might look slightly out of place on a professional workstation). The display panel appears to be a higher quality model than the gaming model, capable of displaying 95 % of the NTSC color spectrum.

Nvidia’s developers have just published a new beta driver for GeForce graphics cards, which promises some quite impressive improvements – particularly in the aforementioned Black Ops 2. The Beta contains all the performance improvements from 310.54 and adds improved support for new titles.

The performance improvements listed only cover desktop graphics cards, but laptop GPUs should be no less affected since they are basically scaled-down versions of their desktop cousins. Nvidia has allegedly achieved a very noteworthy performance improvement of up to 26% in Black Ops 2, as well as an 18% improvement in Assassins Creed 3. I also adds improvements in Planetside 2 and Hitmain: Absolution.

The new drivers are listed as compatible with Vista, Windows 7 and now also Windows 8 and are available for download from the official website. These drivers will not work with all laptops – some manufacturers still insist that you download specific drivers for your particular models (which are rarely if ever updated). However, most recent gaming laptops and custom builds at the upper end of the scale should be fine with the new software.

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http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/new-geforce-310-61-beta-drivers-released/feed/0MSI GX60: ‘First’ AMD-Based Gaming Laptophttp://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/msi-gx60-first-amd-based-gaming-laptop/
http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/news/msi-gx60-first-amd-based-gaming-laptop/#commentsFri, 16 Nov 2012 22:41:16 +0000http://www.gaminglaptopreport.com/?p=3019High-end laptops in general built around AMD processors are few and far between. Full-featured gaming laptops are an even rarer breed. Admittedly, there are a few mid-range and gaming capable laptops with AMD CPUs (or APUs as they are now called), such as the HP dv6z, but that’s more of an exception to the rule.

But here comes MSI and launches the GX60 – a laptop with a 15.6-inch display with anti-reflective coating and 1920 x 1080 resolution, up to 16 GB of RAM, a 128 GB SSD + 750 GB HDD or even dual SSD RAID configuration, most importantly AMD’s most powerful mobile GPU, the Radeon HD 7970M.

In all other cases, this impressive hardware kit would have been accompanied by an Intel Core i7 CPU, but in this case the processor is an AMD A10-4600M. The laptop has a lot in common with the Intel-based GT60, but the A10-4600M APU changes the game completely. It has four cores clocked at 2.3 GHz (with turbo mode 3.2 GHz). Although it’s a quad-core CPU it is more on par with a dual-core Intel Core i5 because of Intel’s Hyperthreading feature that doubles the effective core count.

Being an AMD CPU, the integrated graphics part HD 7660G is also present and capable of quite a bit of mid-range gaming. However, in this case it has been made largely irrelevant by the Radeon HD 7970M. This GPU comes with 1280 Radeon cores running at 850 MHz and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory.

One of the features MSI makes some noise about is the laptop’s capability of powering up to three external monitors with AMD’s Eyefinity tech. Another is the Killer E2200 WLAN module from Qualcomm Atheros that provides lower latencies for games by prioritizing this type of data traffic. The keyboard, like the GX60’s Intel cousins, is designed by SteelSeries.